Overview

UniCon (Universal Connection) is a high-performance, pluggable .NET industrial IoT communication integration framework. It is specifically designed for industrial edge gateways, SCADA platforms, and digital twin systems, running on .NET 10+.

By masking protocol differences through a unified southbound driver interface, the framework provides complete lifecycle management, self-healing reconnection mechanisms, an active polling subscription engine, and REST API northbound integration. This helps developers connect to various industrial protocol devices with minimal integration cost.

Core Value

• Protocol Abstraction: Masks differences between S7, Modbus, OPC UA, MQTT, OPC UA PubSub, etc., through the unified IUniconDriver interface and UniconRequest / UniconResponse<T> request-response models.
• Connection Self-Healing: DriverBase features a built-in Watchdog self-healing thread that supports network disruption awareness (INetworkMonitor) and exponential backoff reconnection. Connections hang during disruption and heal automatically upon recovery.
• High-Performance Scan Scheduling: Built on the ScanScheduler using a minimum waiting time algorithm, utilizing Channel<T> to asynchronously decouple acquisition and callback threads. The IScanStrategy pattern supports both ExceptionBased (deadband filtering) and Polled modes.
• Object-Device Mapping (ODM): An ORM-like design that automatically binds business entity properties to device registers via [UniconDevice] and [UniconAddress] attributes, avoiding hardcoded read/write logic.
• Task Scheduling System: Highly encapsulated based on Quartz.NET, providing built-in scheduled tasks like HttpJob and CommunicationJob, and supporting dynamic runtime CRUD management.
• REST API Northbound Integration: Based on ASP.NET Core Minimal API, offering a full suite of endpoints for driver management, data read/write, subscription control, ODM mapping, and task scheduling.
• Pluggable Caching: Features a built-in MemoryCacheProvider (based on ConcurrentDictionary), which can be seamlessly replaced with a distributed implementation like Redis.

Project Architecture

UniCon
├── UniCon.Core              # Core contracts, scheduling engine, ODM, cache, tasks
├── UniCon.Drivers.S7        # Siemens S7 driver (S7.Net)
├── UniCon.Drivers.Modbus    # Modbus TCP driver (EasyModbus)
├── UniCon.Drivers.OpcUa     # OPC UA client driver (Workstation.UaClient)
├── UniCon.Drivers.Mqtt      # MQTT pub/sub driver (MQTTnet)
├── UniCon.Drivers.OpcUaPubSub  # OPC UA PubSub UDP/MQTT connectionless driver
└── UniCon.WebServer         # Minimal API host (driver management, ODM, task APIs)

Supported Industrial Protocols

Driver	Protocol / Standard	Underlying Library	Driver Alias
S7Driver	Siemens S7 (ISO-on-TCP) S7-200/300/1200/1500	S7.Net	"S7"
ModbusDriver	Modbus TCP (Coil/Holding/Input/Discrete registers)	EasyModbus	"Modbus"
OpcUaDriver	OPC UA Client/Server (Anonymous/Account/Certificate)	Workstation.UaClient	"OpcUa"
MqttDriver	MQTT 3.1/5.0 Pub/Sub (TLS optional)	MQTTnet	"Mqtt"
OpcUaPubSubDriver	OPC UA PubSub UDP Multicast / MQTT (UADP/JSON)	In-house	"OpcUaPubSub"

Target Audience

Designed for developers who need to integrate multiple industrial devices (PLCs, OPC UA Servers, Modbus meters, MQTT Brokers, etc.) for data collection, routing, analysis, or presentation. It is especially suited for industrial edge gateways, digital twin platforms, and IoT integration system scenarios.

Contributors: Entity-now